Open Print Competition Judging

At the camera club tonight the Open Print Competition was judged by Colin Gower from the Huddersfield Camera Club. I didn't have anything in this competition because I haven't got around to mounting prints as yet. I guess I need to make a start on mounting prints so I can get a bit of expert feedback.

The judging was quite interesting and I agreed most of the time with the judges comments but not as often with the scoring. All the prints are marked out of 20 and this judge was very generous with his lowest scores being 14 and 3 prints receiving full marks. Of course it's all very subjective but some of the prints given good comments received low marks whilst others given a lot of criticism about composition and technical achievement received high marks. Maybe I'm missing something?

As usual some of the prints have been seen before and even the judge commented that he'd seen some of the prints previously in a digital competition. I'm still finding it hard to understand why people would want to continuously bring back the same images, for me it would defeat the objective of taking part to learn. Although I suppose it's quite time consuming to prepare prints in the mounts and so re-using them is making the best use of them. I guess I'll find out when I start mounting my own prints.

The next two competitions are both digital so I will most likely enter them. Next week I need to enter 3 black and white photographs and then the following week is architecture so I better get busy.